Caring for the "Next Billion" Mobile Handsets: Proprietary Closures and the Work of Repair

<p>ICTD is profoundly interested in the “next billion” users and how information infrastructures might provide opportu-</p> <p>nities for enhancing their life chances. In this article we ask how the concept of care might be generatively extended</p> <p>to the “lives” of the “next billion” mobile handsets. We draw on a growing literature on repair in ICTD and HCI and on</p> <p>theories of care from the social sciences to make two contributions. First, our ethnographic study of mobile phone re-</p> <p>pair in downtown Kampala, Uganda provides new insights into how technologies are sustained in developing con-</p> <p>texts, with a special focus on how independent repair technicians circumvent the proprietary closures that limit their</p> <p>work. Second, we show how attending to care in ICTD contexts can help us locate forms of technical work (here, re-</p> <p>pair) within wider moral and political orderings. Thinking about repair and care together opens new possibilities for</p> <p>ICTD to engage with the materiality of technologies beyond the points of design, adoption and use the ªeld has</p> <p>more typically privileged</p>